‘I wannabe a copper’: The engagement of Police Community Support Officers with the dominant police occupational culture

Abstract

Drawing upon ethnographic research with PCSOs working in two neighbourhood policing teams in Northern England, this article presents a typology of PCSO orientations to work and for the first time details the ways in which PCSOs utilise aspects of the dominant culture to manage the discord between aspirations and opportunities within the PCSO role. Engagement with aspects of the dominant culture varied according to career aspirations and orientations to work; 'Frustrated PCSOs' were most likely to endorse cultural characteristics as a means of facilitating integration and enhancing opportunities for crime control, whilst Professional PCSOs adopted aspects of the dominant culture when doing so diversified their deployment, enhanced effectiveness and the acquisition of craft skills to support future applications to become police officers. The article concludes by considering the resilience of the traditional police culture, particularly the dominant crimefighting ethos therein and the implications presented for the future of the PCSO role.

A comparative case study of Reserve Deputies in a Florida sheriff’s office and Special Constables in an English police force

“…These tendencies towards cultural negativity in organizational discourses in respect of volunteer police officers perhaps reflect a collision between the concept of volunteer officers, on the one hand, and of a ‘Regular-centric’ (Britton and Callender, 2017) dominant cultural typology of what it means to be a police officer, on the other hand (Cosgrove, 2016). Despite a prominent international drive for pluralization of policing that places greater emphasis and importance on volunteers, significant fractures remain within the extended policing family that suggest the need for significant further cultural attention.…”

Changes in new recruits’ motivation and intentions to use a learning portfolio

“…In addition, evidence suggested that when the PCSO role was first introduced it was not well integrated into the 'police extended family' (Johnston, 2005), and police officers were often confused about the nature of the role due to lack of guidelines (Paskell, 2007). Future research on how the relationship between police officers and trainee PCSOs may impact the learning journey will help shed light on the topic (Cosgrove, 2016).…”

“…Data from a sample of newly recruited Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) were collected in 2009/10. The role of the PCSO was introduced with the enactment of the Police Reform Act in 2002 (Cosgrove, 2016), which created the possibility for police support staff, endowed with limited powers, to undertake a variety of uniformed patrolling tasks. Defined as "uniformed civilian employees of [a] police authority .…”

Police officers’ experiences as victims of hate crime

“…Thirdly, well-established characteristics of police culture resonate with normalising dirty work. Westley's (1970) work identified aspects of police occupational culture -in-group solidarity, preoccupation with danger, isolation from the public, sexism and racism, willingness to use force, relations with minority groups, discretion in decision-making -which others (Skolnick, 1966(Skolnick, , 2008Silvestri, 2003;Reiner, 2010;Loftus, 2010;Cockcroft, 2013;Cosgrove, 2016;Loftus et al, 2016) have explored as dimensions of police cultures. As discussed later, cultures within increasingly diverse police organisations can be both forces for good -a dimension of coping with hostility, and badreproducing inequality and isolation.…”